• Conference about Usenet, federation and moderation

    From =?UTF-8?Q?Julien_=c3=89LIE?=@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 8 09:42:23 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Hi all,

    To share a video I've just came across about "Usenet as the original decentralized social network".
    By Rayner Lucas and Tristan Miller at a LibrePlanet conference in March
    2023. Thanks to both of you for this video!

    https://framatube.org/w/97acbef0-dd05-45d4-a1df-c8ac9cbe36f0


    Indeed, fighting spam and abuse is a daily challenge.

    And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia" and "hard
    for new users to find it" problems. We would have to guess the first
    steps to do about that...

    --
    Julien ÉLIE

    « – I see the world didn't end yesterday.
    – Are you sure? » (Alan Moore, _Watchmen_)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Michael Uplawski@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 8 10:43:19 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Julien ÉLIE wrote in news.software.nntp,news.misc:

    https://framatube.org/w/97acbef0-dd05-45d4-a1df-c8ac9cbe36f0

    (...)

    And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia" and "hard
    for new users to find it" problems. We would have to guess the first
    steps to do about that...

    I admit that I do not like the format of this video. Can you tell me what makes you want to improve about multimedia in Usenet and in which way you think this should be done?

    If I had to guess steps to improve the multimedia capabilities of Usenet, I'd say: *None*.

    The World-Wide-Web exists. Maybe the protocol is rotten beyond repair, maybe we left it to the industries to destroy it and maybe the abyss of antisocial networks and video platforms is so unavoidable that you feel forced to sell your soul to them.

    Technically, nothing impedes your regaining pocession of a technology that is (only) dominated by unnecessary transnational companies.

    Do not pass on the problem to Usenet.

    Cheerio

    f'up news.misc

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  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 9 12:04:26 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Am 08.07.2023 um 09:42:23 Uhr schrieb Julien ÉLIE:

    And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia" and
    "hard for new users to find it" problems.

    Getting new users means it must be findable via normal web searches.

    Something like narkive.com, but with posting possible.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 9 16:43:31 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Am 09.07.2023 um 14:40:20 Uhr schrieb Adam H. Kerman:

    I don't agree. Google has been doing that ever since they bought out
    Deja News. Usenet Article Format and Usenet conventions are different
    enough from Web pages that the search fails to parse the article in a
    useful manner and the person performing the search doesn't get useful results. Conventional Usenet articles have extensive quoting that
    confuse pattern matching, and plenty of users quote just differently
    enough from other users that it's a mess.

    A web gateway could have threading, Google just didn't implement it.

    If I look for content, I regularly get results from Google Groups and narkive.com.

    rocksolid is another software that has a news2web gateway.

    Most internet users only know a web browser.
    To find the Usenet, they need to find interesting information.
    The next step is to make them using an NNTP software.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Doc O'Leary ,@21:1/5 to iulius@nom-de-mon-site.com.invalid on Sun Jul 9 14:29:59 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    For your reference, records indicate that
    =?UTF-8?Q?Julien_=c3=89LIE?= <iulius@nom-de-mon-site.com.invalid> wrote:

    Indeed, fighting spam and abuse is a daily challenge.

    Only inasmuch as people don’t *actually* want to take the steps needed to solve the problem. The UDP was a rare thing, but cutting off hostile
    networks should be one of the first steps in eliminating abuse.

    And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia"

    On the contrary, it is almost trivially easy. The only real problem is
    that binary groups got some people upset right around the time that
    broadband was exploding. While it can certainly be argued that encoded multipart binaries are not the best way to deal with large data files, the
    RFCs haven’t been updated in something like 25 years. Consequently,
    neither have many of the clients, and that’s where 99% of the work has to
    be done to support non-text messages.

    and "hard
    for new users to find it" problems.

    Do people not know how to use search engines anymore? It’s Usenet. It’s been around for ages. The only thing that makes it tough to find is that it’s not being shoved down your throat by advertisers.

    --
    "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
    River Tam, Trash, Firefly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Marco Moock on Sun Jul 9 14:40:20 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
    Am 08.07.2023 um 09:42:23 Uhr schrieb Julien:

    And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia" and
    "hard for new users to find it" problems.

    Getting new users means it must be findable via normal web searches.

    Something like narkive.com, but with posting possible.

    I don't agree. Google has been doing that ever since they bought out
    Deja News. Usenet Article Format and Usenet conventions are different
    enough from Web pages that the search fails to parse the article in a
    useful manner and the person performing the search doesn't get useful
    results. Conventional Usenet articles have extensive quoting that
    confuse pattern matching, and plenty of users quote just differently
    enough from other users that it's a mess.

    Gatewaying to and from Usenet from another medium of communication is UNSUCCESSFUL. The other medium has its own quirks and conventions that
    work poorly on Usenet. Usenet followups require followups. Generally, a
    Web forum shouldn't have quoting unless the reply is to a comment
    further back. A web forum is flat; Usenet is threaded.

    Even gatewaying to and from mailing lists is unsuccessful. I do
    Usenet-style quoting in reply to an email message. Nearly no one else
    does.

    You're kind of arguing that gatewaying will increase the poast count and
    that will save Usenet. That's just traffic for the sake of traffic but
    that's not more Usenet discussion.

    What we need are users willing to learn to use a threading newsreader and subscribe to a News server who want to hold discussions with other
    people using newsreaders and not Web gateways. A Web interface to Usenet
    WITH POSTING will not result in a conventional Usenet article. A gateway
    from a Web forum will not result in Usenet-style discussion.

    There's nothing wrong with having different media of discussion, with
    different conventions, different formats, and different methods of
    access. Usenet's benefit is that our communication method works quite
    well for what we do. Making it as Web-forum-like as possible will ruin
    Usenet's inherent advantages.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 9 16:44:50 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Am 09.07.2023 um 14:29:59 Uhr schrieb Doc O'Leary ,:

    On the contrary, it is almost trivially easy. The only real problem
    is that binary groups got some people upset right around the time
    that broadband was exploding. While it can certainly be argued that
    encoded multipart binaries are not the best way to deal with large
    data files, the RFCs haven’t been updated in something like 25 years.
    Consequently, neither have many of the clients, and that’s where 99%
    of the work has to be done to support non-text messages.

    Why do people feel disturbed by them?
    They don't need to subscribe to them and news servers need to make sure
    that binary attachments cannot be posted.
    That's all.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Marco Moock on Sun Jul 9 15:37:50 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
    Am 09.07.2023 um 14:40:20 Uhr schrieb Adam H. Kerman:

    I don't agree. Google has been doing that ever since they bought out
    Deja News. Usenet Article Format and Usenet conventions are different >>enough from Web pages that the search fails to parse the article in a >>useful manner and the person performing the search doesn't get useful >>results. Conventional Usenet articles have extensive quoting that
    confuse pattern matching, and plenty of users quote just differently
    enough from other users that it's a mess.

    A web gateway could have threading, Google just didn't implement it.

    We've had decades of experience with Web gateways. Yes, in theory, they
    could possibly produce a conventional article. Nevertheless, in the real
    world, there are no examples of gateways that produce a conventional article.

    If I look for content, I regularly get results from Google Groups and >narkive.com.

    There's no convenient way to limit the search to just Usenet. Deja's
    search method was adequate. Google's has been dreadful. To search for a
    Usenet article, you need the search to be set up to look for headers and
    to be able to distinguish between header and body.

    Conflating a Web and Usenet search will give the user lousy results, particularly as the parser cannot identify the quote and NOT provide the
    quote as a result. And then you'll be led to an interface that won't
    thread.

    I'm sorry but this will not attract a new user because it's so ugly.

    rocksolid is another software that has a news2web gateway.

    Most internet users only know a web browser.
    To find the Usenet, they need to find interesting information.
    The next step is to make them using an NNTP software.

    When I first used Usenet, I tried pine, but its Usenet presentation was
    lousy. I then learned to use a threading newsreader. I'm sorry but
    it wasn't a barrier. If my first experience with Usenet was via a Web interface, I would have been entirely turned off.

    A threading newsreader is key to a decent experience. The Web interface
    doesn't provide that.

    As you point out long-standing gateways, I'm not aware that any
    significant number of their users learned to post via newsreaders.
    Instead, they appear to be people who were using Usenet who use the Web interface because of technology limitations with cell phone and their
    personal dislike of laptop or desktop computers.

    We already know what hasn't been attracting new users to Usenet.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 9 19:13:03 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Am 09.07.2023 um 15:37:50 Uhr schrieb Adam H. Kerman:

    We already know what hasn't been attracting new users to Usenet.

    I was one of them.
    Without finding articles via narkive.com, I would never post here.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Marco Moock on Sun Jul 9 17:50:04 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
    Am 09.07.2023 um 15:37:50 Uhr schrieb Adam H. Kerman:

    We already know what hasn't been attracting new users to Usenet.

    I was one of them.
    Without finding articles via narkive.com, I would never post here.

    I'll note you didn't state that you had used a non-site-limited Google search.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John@21:1/5 to droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystup on Sun Jul 9 18:08:08 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> writes:

    For your reference, records indicate that
    =?UTF-8?Q?Julien_=c3=89LIE?= <iulius@nom-de-mon-site.com.invalid> wrote:

    Indeed, fighting spam and abuse is a daily challenge.

    Only inasmuch as people don’t *actually* want to take the steps needed to solve the problem. The UDP was a rare thing, but cutting off hostile networks should be one of the first steps in eliminating abuse.


    If anything deserves a UDP it's Google Groups.


    john

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Doc O'Leary ,@21:1/5 to Marco Moock on Sat Jul 15 15:01:03 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    For your reference, records indicate that
    Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:

    Am 09.07.2023 um 14:29:59 Uhr schrieb Doc O'Leary ,:

    On the contrary, it is almost trivially easy. The only real problem
    is that binary groups got some people upset right around the time
    that broadband was exploding.

    Why do people feel disturbed by them?

    In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden
    to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to use it to
    their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and destroyed it.

    Kind of off topic, but it has been amusing to watch the saga of how the alternative have played out in a way that still did not benefit the
    content creators. Musicians complain about the pennies they make from streaming. Writers and actors are both on strike now because Hollywood I
    s being Hollywood. And the places providing porn are still under attack
    from the morality police, as the woes of PornHub and others in Utah and
    beyond are many. It almost makes it seem like the problem never *was*
    Usenet at all! :-/

    They don't need to subscribe to them and news servers need to make sure
    that binary attachments cannot be posted.
    That's all.

    Yeah, but that’s not really Usenet, either; an upstream that censors the content people are looking for is not useful. The whole binary/non-binary divide is a relic from an era when you needed to fill a room with
    equipment that was 1/10th of what you carry around in your pocket today.
    To be relevant in the modern world, a revamp of Usenet would need better support for non-text message content, plain and simple.

    But, then, I’m not sure any major shift like that would be “Usenet” any more, either. You quickly start bumping into a lot of protocols that are solving similar store-and-forward problems, like Message Queues, Web3, and
    so many other efforts. The overlap and the churn in technology has been
    as exponential as the rest of the advances. As nice as it has been that
    Usenet has been stable for the last two decades, it was fundamentally a suicidal choice.

    --
    "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
    River Tam, Trash, Firefly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystup on Sat Jul 15 09:37:50 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> writes:

    In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that
    are disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to
    use it to their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and
    destroyed it.

    A caveat to this analysis is CSAM (child sexual abuse material). (And a
    few related nonconsentual things like revenge porn and torture videos, but
    CSAM is the most obvious and straightforward to analyze.) This problem is unfortunately used by the most authoritarian assholes in government as an excuse to do all sorts of nasty surveillance state shit, so it's very
    tempting to decide the whole problem is imaginary and was invented by
    wannabe tin-pot dictators to try to get vast police powers. But
    unfortunately if you work for any length of time in or around abuse
    prevention, you very quickly realize that it's also a real problem. There
    are indeed organized groups of peoople who are trying to trade CSAM and
    will use your service to do it if you let them, and there's real abuse of
    real people underneath it.

    Every single service that lets people trade file formats that can be used
    for CSAM eventually has to come to terms with this and figure out how
    they're going to handle it. And regardless of what you personally may
    feel about how the law *should* handle this problem, the rest of society
    has really strong opinions about it for rather understandable reasons and
    in most countries has set a bunch of rules for how you WILL handle it
    whether you like it or not, often backed up by the threat of actual
    criminal prosecution, not just the copyright cartel nonsense.

    I mostly stay out of these discussions because I ended up saying pretty
    much everything I had to say back in 2005 or so and burned out on them,
    but people who haven't worked in platform abuse regularly drastically underestimate the amount of really dark and disturbing shit that people
    try to use services to distribute *and make* and assume that the usual
    suspects are just lying about it to scare people. And don't get me wrong,
    they do routinely lie about things to scare people. But this one is worth thinking about independently and figuring out how you are going to deal
    with, because getting in the middle of that is really bad. Legally, yes,
    but also seeing stuff that you will really want to unsee.

    Kind of off topic, but it has been amusing to watch the saga of how the alternative have played out in a way that still did not benefit the
    content creators. Musicians complain about the pennies they make from streaming. Writers and actors are both on strike now because Hollywood
    I s being Hollywood. And the places providing porn are still under
    attack from the morality police, as the woes of PornHub and others in
    Utah and beyond are many. It almost makes it seem like the problem
    never *was* Usenet at all! :-/

    The problem certainly was never Usenet. Usenet has always been a bit of a backwater, and a lot of this stuff is indeed capitalist bullshit or
    prudish nonsense. But Usenet is also not somehow immune from the more
    serious problems that do exist.

    The absolute libertarian position is very tempting here. For a long time
    I too was persuaded by it, and I think it does work up to a certain scale.
    But the world is very large and full of people and a tiny fraction of
    those people want to do some seriously evil shit and will use your servers
    to do it if you let them, and you do need to have some sort of plan to
    stop them unless you are willing to support a type of social free-for-all
    that 99.99% of humanity is not going to be willing to tolerate.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John Levine@21:1/5 to All on Sat Jul 15 16:37:24 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    According to Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com>:
    In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are >disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden
    to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to use it to >their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and destroyed it.

    Hi, I've managed news servers since the 1980s. I never carried many of
    the binary newsgoups for entirely practical reasons. They were (and
    are) enormous which in the era of slow, often dialup, transfers tied
    up phone lines for hours on end and filled up the small disks we had.
    The contents were mostly pictures of nude women and hacked computer
    games, neither of which were of much interest to my users.

    While there is plenty not to like about the way copyright law works,
    that doesn't mean you get to ignore it. Before the DMCA was passed in
    1998 it was entirely unclear what liability a server operator had for
    pirate content other people put on our servers. Since we generally
    were running our servers in our spare time with a legal budget of $0,
    taking risks for stuff our users didn't care about would have been
    idiotic. So we didn't. Once people started to get dialup or direct
    connections to the Internet, they had a lot better ways to download
    binary stuff than multipart uuencoded news messages.

    I realize that conspiracy theories are more fun, but sometimes
    life is boring and practical.

    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Doc O'Leary ,@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Thu Jul 20 04:54:43 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    For your reference, records indicate that
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com> writes:

    In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to
    use it to their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and
    destroyed it.

    A caveat to this analysis is CSAM (child sexual abuse material). (And a
    few related nonconsentual things like revenge porn and torture videos, but CSAM is the most obvious and straightforward to analyze.)

    I don’t even think we have to focus on illegal, hot-button content. It’s all just bits of data. My point remains that simply getting rid of data
    on Usenet doesn’t cause that data to cease to exist, but it did instead
    cause Usenet to cease to be a relevant part of the Internet.

    There
    are indeed organized groups of peoople who are trying to trade CSAM and
    will use your service to do it if you let them, and there's real abuse of real people underneath it.

    So you put in the effort to *solve* that problem, not sweep it under the
    rug, which is all you accomplish when you start deleting data. And that’s not even accounting for all the *legitimate* content that was suppressed
    (i.e., hosted by commercial interests like YouTube) by eliminating all
    binary content on free networks like Usenet. It was just the wrong
    decision made for the wrong reason at exactly the wrong time in Internet history.

    But this one is worth
    thinking about independently and figuring out how you are going to deal
    with, because getting in the middle of that is really bad.

    My point is always going to come back to the fact that few people are
    actually interested in solving abuse on *any* platform. Whether that be
    CSAM or simple spam or just someone who won’t stop trolling. There just appears to be too much money to be made in *not* solving those problems.
    Same reason kids are going to keep getting shot in schools.

    The problem certainly was never Usenet. Usenet has always been a bit of a backwater, and a lot of this stuff is indeed capitalist bullshit or
    prudish nonsense. But Usenet is also not somehow immune from the more serious problems that do exist.

    Sure, and that’s why I say it was a missed opportunity. The blanket loss
    of binary groups was just so much NIMBY. The same wack-a-mole approach
    has failed on platform after platform for the last 30 years. They could
    have been using Usenet to study the network effects this whole time instead
    of starting from scratch with every new fad social media site that gets
    some popular traction.

    The absolute libertarian position is very tempting here. For a long time
    I too was persuaded by it, and I think it does work up to a certain scale. But the world is very large and full of people and a tiny fraction of
    those people want to do some seriously evil shit and will use your servers
    to do it if you let them, and you do need to have some sort of plan to
    stop them unless you are willing to support a type of social free-for-all that 99.99% of humanity is not going to be willing to tolerate.

    But it’s worse than that! It’s gone the other way: cloud platforms have business models where the profit motive is in *supporting* that evil shit.
    What does Amazon care how much it costs you to defend against their abusive customers, so long as they make their nickel . . .

    It’d be *great* if we could talk about a “plan to stop them” on Usenet. But Usenet was destroyed by the decision to delete the very data that could
    be used to do that planning. Even spammers have left; I haven’t had an
    email address of mine scraped from posts here since ~2016.


    --
    "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
    River Tam, Trash, Firefly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Doc O'Leary ,@21:1/5 to John Levine on Thu Jul 20 05:43:32 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    For your reference, records indicate that
    John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

    According to Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com>:
    In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are
    disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden >to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to use it to >their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and destroyed it.

    Hi, I've managed news servers since the 1980s. I never carried many of
    the binary newsgoups for entirely practical reasons. They were (and
    are) enormous which in the era of slow, often dialup, transfers tied
    up phone lines for hours on end and filled up the small disks we had.

    That simply speaks to the problem if scaling the network, which has nothing
    to do with any particular data format or content. If store-and-forward is
    the wrong solution, what is the right solution? What about a caching proxy
    for just-in-time delivery of messages? It’s kinda moot to have this discussion now, though, because we’ve had 20 years of alternative protocols establishing themselves.

    While there is plenty not to like about the way copyright law works,
    that doesn't mean you get to ignore it.

    Neither do lawyers get to ignore the realities of math. And math always
    wins, because it isn’t fabricated the way laws are. Copyright infringement didn’t start with Usenet, and it didn’t disappear from the Internet because people dropped binary newsgroups.

    Once people started to get dialup or direct
    connections to the Internet, they had a lot better ways to download
    binary stuff than multipart uuencoded news messages.

    Only for certain definitions of “better”. Maybe more efficient and more reliable. But Usenet is/was the network effect in all its decentralized
    glory. These messages exist *everywhere* on the network, you don’t just “download” them from a single commercial entity, which is how all the “better” modern services work. I’m not exactly sure how any particular federated technology addresses that point, but I’m personally not
    interested in any new technology that only exists on someone else’s
    computer.

    I realize that conspiracy theories are more fun, but sometimes
    life is boring and practical.

    What killed Usenet is that it wasn’t practical any longer. No grand conspiracies from me. People simply wanted binaries, even if only to
    share family photos and pet videos. When they got a “no”, they didn’t even care that you were hiding behind your lawyers and suggesting they
    might be thieves, they just heard the “no” and left. If you want them to return, you have to formulate a more practical answer than “still no”.

    --
    "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
    River Tam, Trash, Firefly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com on Wed Jul 19 23:21:06 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    There are indeed organized groups of peoople who are trying to trade
    CSAM and will use your service to do it if you let them, and there's
    real abuse of real people underneath it.

    So you put in the effort to *solve* that problem, not sweep it under the
    rug, which is all you accomplish when you start deleting data.

    The specific thing you are required to do by US law (in my personal understanding, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice for your
    specific situation, read it for yourself at [1]) is report the data to
    NCMEC and then make it inaccessible, not delete it (which would be
    destroying evidence), so in that narrow sense I do actually agree with
    you. I suspect this is similar in most other jurisdictions, although
    obviously NCMEC is a US thing so the details will vary.

    [1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2258A

    However, I personally would rather juggle raw plutonium than spend any
    time handling that kind of legal evidence and therefore opt out of the
    entire problem by not carrying binaries, since otherwise I am legally
    obligated to spend whatever time it takes me to handle that data properly should any problem arise. Since personally I don't care about any of the binaries anyway (there are numerous better sources for any non-textual information I want than Usenet), this seems like it would be a very bad
    use of my time, even apart from the fact that if I ever got a report I
    would have to go look at the reported data to see if the report was
    correct and that does not sound fun. Likewise for DMCA, which is less
    legally fraught but still highly annoying.

    Other people's mileage may vary, and that's fine! Just know what you're getting into and realize that no one involved in enforcing laws cares in
    the slightest what your opinion is of those laws, so it's worth carefully picking what types of civil disobedience you want to engage in.
    Personally, I vote against copyright bullshit but don't engage in civil disobedience around it. That's where my personal risk tradeoff is.

    My point is always going to come back to the fact that few people are actually interested in solving abuse on *any* platform.

    Well, I have spent a bunch of time working professionally with people who
    are trying to reduce platform abuse and I have a huge amount of respect
    for the work that they do. I don't think anyone who works professionally
    in the field thinks this problem is *solvable*. It's a classic
    adversarial security problem, and those are almost never solvable. You
    would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear, and, well,
    good luck with that. Governments have been trying for millennia. The
    best you can manage is harm reduction.

    You can do various things to make it easier and various things to make it harder. One of the most effective things you can do to make dealing with
    abuse easier is to ban all non-textual media, because that takes a lot of
    the most annoying, dangerous, or horrific types of abuse off the table. Obviously, that's a tradeoff, and if everyone made that tradeoff that
    would be sad for society since there are a lot of non-textual things that
    are worth sharing. But I leave hosting the non-textual stuff to people
    with platform abuse teams and lawyers on retainer. Again, that's where my
    risk tradeoff is.

    I think people who think fully decentralized annoymous (or even mostly anonymous) non-textual file sharing is something they want to get involved
    in are completely out of their gourd because you're just hanging up a
    giant sign saying "trade all of your illegal shit here, viruses welcome,"
    but I'm not the government and I'm not going to stop you. My only goal
    here is to make sure people at least go into it with their eyes open.

    But it’s worse than that! It’s gone the other way: cloud platforms have business models where the profit motive is in *supporting* that evil
    shit.

    I wanted to say that this is definitely not true, but I think I can see
    how one might see that this is true from a particular angle. It is true
    that in pursuit of profits, a bunch of companies have built network
    platforms that make abuse much easier, and are now desperately trying to
    play catch-up to filter out the shit that they don't want to carry. There
    is an interesting argument to be made that social media itself is the
    problem and we should not have any social media at all because it enables abuse. I don't think I *agree* with that argument, but one can certainly
    make that argument coherently, and it's gaining some social popularity.
    (This is what repealing section 230 in the US would mean: make social
    media effectively illegal by making every service provider liable for everything they carry. And there are a fair number of advocates for that, although not all of them understand what they're advocating.)

    But if you mean the cloud providers are happy about or actively encourage people doing evil shit like CSAM on their platforms, this is absolutely
    100% not true and I know it's not true from direct personal experience.
    Cloud platforms spend large quantities of money, hire whole teams of very expensive people, and write whole new algorithms and scanning methods to
    try to get rid of shit like CSAM. It's a significant expense; it is
    absolutely not a profit center. They do that in part because people who
    work for cloud platforms are human and have normal human feelings about
    CSAM, in part because it's a public relations nightmare, and in part
    because not doing some parts of that work is illegal.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com on Wed Jul 19 23:27:36 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
    John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

    While there is plenty not to like about the way copyright law works,
    that doesn't mean you get to ignore it.

    Neither do lawyers get to ignore the realities of math. And math always wins, because it isn’t fabricated the way laws are.

    Standing in court yelling MATH WILL ALWAYS WIN is very emotionally
    satisfying, but weirdly it doesn't make the court judgment go away. Maybe
    the lawyers won't be able to ignore the realities of math forever, but
    they do in fact get to ignore the realities of math long enough to tell
    the men with guns to go take your money.

    What killed Usenet is that it wasn’t practical any longer. No grand conspiracies from me. People simply wanted binaries, even if only to
    share family photos and pet videos. When they got a “no”, they didn’t even care that you were hiding behind your lawyers and suggesting they
    might be thieves, they just heard the “no” and left.

    This is a bizarrely confused history of Usenet. The binary groups were
    going strong for years after the text groups were dying. What killed
    Usenet was that it had no solution for spam that actually worked for the average person, only complicated and weird filtering experiments that
    never quite worked right.

    Spoiler: Still has exactly the same problems. Usenet is just too dead for spammers to care about it (mostly). If it were ever revived, the same
    problem would immediately come back.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Richard Kettlewell@21:1/5 to droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com on Thu Jul 20 08:37:07 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
    John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
    According to Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com>:
    In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are
    disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden >> >to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to use it to
    their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and destroyed it.

    Hi, I've managed news servers since the 1980s. I never carried many of
    the binary newsgoups for entirely practical reasons. They were (and
    are) enormous which in the era of slow, often dialup, transfers tied
    up phone lines for hours on end and filled up the small disks we had.

    Like John, when I was operating NNTP service for anyone other than
    myself, we excluded binaries because they were too expensive to
    carry. The CSAM risk was mitigated by subscribing to a service which
    notified us of illegal material so we could delete it.

    Text groups carried legal risks too, at the time, but that didn’t stop
    us carrying text Usenet.

    Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
    relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
    they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.

    That simply speaks to the problem if scaling the network, which has
    nothing to do with any particular data format or content. If store-and-forward is the wrong solution, what is the right solution?
    What about a caching proxy for just-in-time delivery of messages?
    It’s kinda moot to have this discussion now, though, because we’ve had
    20 years of alternative protocols establishing themselves.

    Those alternative protocols suggest that the solution is for end users
    to download from centralized services (sometimes through a caching
    proxy, indeed).

    I realize that conspiracy theories are more fun, but sometimes
    life is boring and practical.

    What killed Usenet is that it wasn’t practical any longer. No grand conspiracies from me. People simply wanted binaries, even if only to
    share family photos and pet videos. When they got a “no”, they didn’t even care that you were hiding behind your lawyers and suggesting they
    might be thieves, they just heard the “no” and left. If you want them
    to return, you have to formulate a more practical answer than “still
    no”.

    People left Usenet because of the spam and trolling, not because they couldn’t use it to get hold of pirated video games and movies.

    --
    https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Thu Jul 20 13:22:51 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 20, 2023 at 1:21:06 AM CDT, "Russ Allbery" <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    But if you mean the cloud providers are happy about or actively encourage people doing evil shit like CSAM on their platforms, this is absolutely
    100% not true and I know it's not true from direct personal experience.
    Cloud platforms spend large quantities of money, hire whole teams of very expensive people, and write whole new algorithms and scanning methods to
    try to get rid of shit like CSAM. It's a significant expense; it is absolutely not a profit center. They do that in part because people who
    work for cloud platforms are human and have normal human feelings about
    CSAM, in part because it's a public relations nightmare, and in part
    because not doing some parts of that work is illegal.

    Maybe you aren't aware but numerous claims have been made over the years about service providers profiting from CSAM specifically, including a Usenet Service Provider whom straddles both sides of profit and cooperation with law enforcement.

    https://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm

    Having worked in the Service Provider industry my entire career, whether or
    not you believe the particular account cited above, it is not far-fetched
    based on my experiences.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to invalid@invalid.invalid on Thu Jul 20 13:24:19 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 20, 2023 at 2:37:07 AM CDT, "Richard Kettlewell" <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
    John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:
    According to Doc O'Leary , <droleary.usenet@2023.impossiblystupid.com>: >>>> In general, actual *people* aren’t disturbed. It’s the *powers* that are
    disturbed. Usenet is a content distribution network that isn’t beholden >>>> to capitalistic principles. Rather than figuring out a way to use it to >>>> their advantage, they rolled out the legal threats and destroyed it.

    Hi, I've managed news servers since the 1980s. I never carried many of
    the binary newsgoups for entirely practical reasons. They were (and
    are) enormous which in the era of slow, often dialup, transfers tied
    up phone lines for hours on end and filled up the small disks we had.

    Like John, when I was operating NNTP service for anyone other than
    myself, we excluded binaries because they were too expensive to
    carry. The CSAM risk was mitigated by subscribing to a service which
    notified us of illegal material so we could delete it.

    Text groups carried legal risks too, at the time, but that didn’t stop
    us carrying text Usenet.

    Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
    relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
    they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.

    I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities near the NSA.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Marco Moock on Thu Jul 20 15:44:34 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
    Am 20.07.2023 um 13:24:19 Uhr schrieb Jesse Rehmer:

    I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet >>providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
    handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
    near the NSA.

    Is there a specific (legal) reason for that?

    Lots of communications infrastructure and power to serve Fort Meade?
    Seems like the right place to site a server farm.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to Jesse Rehmer on Thu Jul 20 09:05:46 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

    Maybe you aren't aware but numerous claims have been made over the years about service providers profiting from CSAM specifically, including a
    Usenet Service Provider whom straddles both sides of profit and
    cooperation with law enforcement.

    https://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm

    I should be clear: I am not saying that absolutely no service provider
    anywhere has ever decided to try to profit from CSAM. Obviously I can't
    make a claim like that, particularly given that 8chan and company exists.
    I personally know nothing about Giganews and would be a fool to comment.

    The world is large and full of people. I'm sure just about every awful
    thing anyone can think of has been attempted by someone at one point or another.

    My point is only that the idea that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta,
    Apple, etc. (the companies that most people think of when someone says
    "cloud provider" which was the term used in the message I was replying to)
    have a business model built on CSAM is directly contradicted by the very
    real and large expenditures by those same companies to try to get that
    stuff off their platforms as much as they possibly can given other
    constraints they have around promises of user privacy, etc.

    The shape of their problem is instead that they have been wildly
    successful beyond any of their reasonable expectations and with that level
    of scale comes a level of platform abuse that they were wholly unprepared originally to deal with. They're still desperately digging themselves out
    of that hole and occasionally falling into it again. But if they could
    somehow make the problem go away, they would *love* to do so.

    One tension they have is that a lot of people also (quite understandably)
    feel pretty weird, at best, about their cloud provider saying "oh, we're
    going to scan everything you do to see if any of it would be of interest
    to the cops," which means they would strongly prefer to be reactive rather
    than proactive, but some of these groups are quite sophisticated and find
    new ways of hiding from reactive scanning techniques. Another tension
    they have is that in a lot of cases they would like to promise end-to-end
    user privacy because it's a selling point, but end-to-end user privacy
    from the cloud provider means they by definition cannot scan or do
    anything else about whatever is crossing that channel, so they end up in a three way fight between privacy advocates, the government, and the news
    media. (And, to be clear, usually manage to say the stupidest possible
    things and step on five rakes in the process.)

    It's an incredibly tricky area and I certainly don't have all of the right answers. All I know is that (a) Usenet is a hobby for me and I'm not
    going near this mess with a ten foot pole and would strongly recommend
    against anyone else doing so either unless you have the money for lawyers
    and a real anti-abuse team, and (b) the idea that cloud providers in
    general benefit from CSAM seems like bullshit to me given the amount of
    money they spend on trying to get rid of it and trying to control the
    public relations fallout from the bits they didn't manage to get rid of.
    Even if the balance of money is slightly towards profit (which I highly
    doubt), it's UTTERLY dwarfed by their legitimate business and directly threatens it, so it is certainly not a motivating force for the typical
    cloud provider.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Richard@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 20 16:01:15 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    [Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

    =?UTF-8?Q?Julien_=c3=89LIE?= <iulius@nom-de-mon-site.com.invalid> spake the secret code
    <u8b40v$30nta$1@news.trigofacile.com> thusly:

    Indeed, fighting spam and abuse is a daily challenge.

    The only way to combat this is to sign articles and establish trust
    networks and deny spammers membership in the trust networks. Note
    that this does not preclude anonymity.

    And it's not easy to improve the "poor support for multimedia"

    This is a solved problem for decades (MIME). What's always been
    missing is good newsreader support and a cultural willingness to
    embrace content beyond text/plain. IMO, the latter is the big
    stumbling point; it's a cultural issue not a technological one.

    and "hard for new users to find it" problems.

    This is a problem? :)

    Being hard to find keeps out the rugrats.
    --
    "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
    The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals-wiki.org>
    The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
    Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Marco Moock@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 20 17:23:50 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Am 20.07.2023 um 13:24:19 Uhr schrieb Jesse Rehmer:

    I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
    handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
    near the NSA.

    Is there a specific (legal) reason for that?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to Jesse Rehmer on Thu Jul 20 10:34:24 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

    I was not directly involved, but worked on the Hosting help desk while
    this was ongoing, and know that we had the knowledge, capabilities, and
    man power to shut them all off within a few hours, but the higher ups
    let it drag out for a year or more before finally terminating
    contracts. It wasn't until it started to hit the news and they began receiving external pressure that they changed their tune, and very
    slowly terminated the bad actors. I realize this is not exactly the same scenario as CSAM, but I've witnessed decisions made at executive levels
    that chose profits over doing what is legal or right.

    Service Providers in the USA have immense protections, perhaps a lot
    more than they should, and we're going through another phase where that
    is being re-examined and up for litigation. Having been somewhat of a man-in-the-middle of all things related to Internet and Society - I'm
    not exactly sure where I stand on most of it either.

    Yeah, this is all very fair and I agree with everything you say here. The smaller the provider, the more likely that the response to platlform abuse
    will be... shall we say, random. Some companies will take immediate
    action; some companies will avoid doing anything for as long as possible.

    Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I think in *most* cases the lack of
    action is some combination of the fact that dealing with this stuff
    requires spending money that doesn't make any profits and small companies
    are more likely to feel like this is unfair and be very grudging about
    doing it, plus the general human tendency to believe that any problem that
    one doesn't want to deal with can't possibly be as bad as people claim it
    is. I think actual malice is rather rare, but cutting corners and not
    spending money where it seems avoidable is very common.

    There are also, of course, folks with strong libertarian principles,
    probably more common among the sort of folks who often start small
    businesses, and as long as the argument feels like it's on the level of abstract principles, it's easy to decide that the libertarian principles
    should win. (Again, maybe I'm too optimistic, but I don't think this
    tends to survive direct contact with the worst types of platform abuse.
    But thankfully that sort of abuse is relatively rare, so the debate
    sometimes stays abstract for a long time.)

    The larger companies do not have the luxury of ignoring this sort of
    problem and already have frequent contact with law enforcement due to the simple fact that people live large amounts of their lives on cloud
    providers these days, so legal investigations constantly go there.
    They're more likely to have thought somewhat seriously about this and have employees whose job it is to figure out what to do, although even in those cases they tend to be underresourced compared to the size of the problem.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Thu Jul 20 17:23:03 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 20, 2023 at 11:05:46 AM CDT, "Russ Allbery" <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

    Maybe you aren't aware but numerous claims have been made over the years
    about service providers profiting from CSAM specifically, including a
    Usenet Service Provider whom straddles both sides of profit and
    cooperation with law enforcement.

    https://cryptome.org/2014/09/giganews-fbi.htm

    I should be clear: I am not saying that absolutely no service provider anywhere has ever decided to try to profit from CSAM. Obviously I can't
    make a claim like that, particularly given that 8chan and company exists.
    I personally know nothing about Giganews and would be a fool to comment.

    The world is large and full of people. I'm sure just about every awful
    thing anyone can think of has been attempted by someone at one point or another.

    My point is only that the idea that Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta,
    Apple, etc. (the companies that most people think of when someone says
    "cloud provider" which was the term used in the message I was replying to) have a business model built on CSAM is directly contradicted by the very
    real and large expenditures by those same companies to try to get that
    stuff off their platforms as much as they possibly can given other constraints they have around promises of user privacy, etc.

    The shape of their problem is instead that they have been wildly
    successful beyond any of their reasonable expectations and with that level
    of scale comes a level of platform abuse that they were wholly unprepared originally to deal with. They're still desperately digging themselves out
    of that hole and occasionally falling into it again. But if they could somehow make the problem go away, they would *love* to do so.

    One tension they have is that a lot of people also (quite understandably) feel pretty weird, at best, about their cloud provider saying "oh, we're going to scan everything you do to see if any of it would be of interest
    to the cops," which means they would strongly prefer to be reactive rather than proactive, but some of these groups are quite sophisticated and find
    new ways of hiding from reactive scanning techniques. Another tension
    they have is that in a lot of cases they would like to promise end-to-end user privacy because it's a selling point, but end-to-end user privacy
    from the cloud provider means they by definition cannot scan or do
    anything else about whatever is crossing that channel, so they end up in a three way fight between privacy advocates, the government, and the news media. (And, to be clear, usually manage to say the stupidest possible things and step on five rakes in the process.)

    It's an incredibly tricky area and I certainly don't have all of the right answers. All I know is that (a) Usenet is a hobby for me and I'm not
    going near this mess with a ten foot pole and would strongly recommend against anyone else doing so either unless you have the money for lawyers
    and a real anti-abuse team, and (b) the idea that cloud providers in
    general benefit from CSAM seems like bullshit to me given the amount of
    money they spend on trying to get rid of it and trying to control the
    public relations fallout from the bits they didn't manage to get rid of.
    Even if the balance of money is slightly towards profit (which I highly doubt), it's UTTERLY dwarfed by their legitimate business and directly threatens it, so it is certainly not a motivating force for the typical
    cloud provider.

    I shouldn't have painted with such a broad stroke, as I didn't mean to imply that the large cloud providers mentioned had such business models or
    interests, but the service provider realm is broad and complicated.

    In the early 2000s I worked for SAVVIS (now Lumen) and at the time they were harboring a lot of very bad actors within their hosting platform as well as providing IP transit services to such entities, mostly stemming from the acquisitions of Cable & Wireless and Exodus/MCI, but it was a bigger spectrum than the "spammers" that were represented in the media at the time.

    I was not directly involved, but worked on the Hosting help desk while this
    was ongoing, and know that we had the knowledge, capabilities, and man power
    to shut them all off within a few hours, but the higher ups let it drag out
    for a year or more before finally terminating contracts. It wasn't until it started to hit the news and they began receiving external pressure that they changed their tune, and very slowly terminated the bad actors. I realize this is not exactly the same scenario as CSAM, but I've witnessed decisions made at executive levels that chose profits over doing what is legal or right.

    Service Providers in the USA have immense protections, perhaps a lot more than they should, and we're going through another phase where that is being re-examined and up for litigation. Having been somewhat of a man-in-the-middle of all things related to Internet and Society - I'm not exactly sure where I stand on most of it either.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Thu Jul 20 18:03:43 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 20, 2023 at 12:34:24 PM CDT, "Russ Allbery" <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

    I was not directly involved, but worked on the Hosting help desk while
    this was ongoing, and know that we had the knowledge, capabilities, and
    man power to shut them all off within a few hours, but the higher ups
    let it drag out for a year or more before finally terminating
    contracts. It wasn't until it started to hit the news and they began
    receiving external pressure that they changed their tune, and very
    slowly terminated the bad actors. I realize this is not exactly the same
    scenario as CSAM, but I've witnessed decisions made at executive levels
    that chose profits over doing what is legal or right.

    Service Providers in the USA have immense protections, perhaps a lot
    more than they should, and we're going through another phase where that
    is being re-examined and up for litigation. Having been somewhat of a
    man-in-the-middle of all things related to Internet and Society - I'm
    not exactly sure where I stand on most of it either.

    Yeah, this is all very fair and I agree with everything you say here. The smaller the provider, the more likely that the response to platlform abuse will be... shall we say, random. Some companies will take immediate
    action; some companies will avoid doing anything for as long as possible.

    Perhaps I am too optimistic, but I think in *most* cases the lack of
    action is some combination of the fact that dealing with this stuff
    requires spending money that doesn't make any profits and small companies
    are more likely to feel like this is unfair and be very grudging about
    doing it, plus the general human tendency to believe that any problem that one doesn't want to deal with can't possibly be as bad as people claim it
    is. I think actual malice is rather rare, but cutting corners and not spending money where it seems avoidable is very common.

    There are also, of course, folks with strong libertarian principles,
    probably more common among the sort of folks who often start small businesses, and as long as the argument feels like it's on the level of abstract principles, it's easy to decide that the libertarian principles should win. (Again, maybe I'm too optimistic, but I don't think this
    tends to survive direct contact with the worst types of platform abuse.
    But thankfully that sort of abuse is relatively rare, so the debate
    sometimes stays abstract for a long time.)

    The larger companies do not have the luxury of ignoring this sort of
    problem and already have frequent contact with law enforcement due to the simple fact that people live large amounts of their lives on cloud
    providers these days, so legal investigations constantly go there.
    They're more likely to have thought somewhat seriously about this and have employees whose job it is to figure out what to do, although even in those cases they tend to be underresourced compared to the size of the problem.

    In my personal experience I find that companies which are controlled by a
    Board of Directors generally lean towards doing and spending as little as possible in order to retain valuable customers or prevent legal penalties, and have no issue directing those below to ignore their conscience.

    The smaller or privately held providers whom are controlled by founders or 'techies' tend to take such matters more seriously and with a lot more conscience (unless their only business model is the trouble makers).

    It all depends on who is at the top and what sort of conscience they have, or don't, I suppose.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to Jesse Rehmer on Thu Jul 20 11:55:56 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

    There are far cheaper geographical locations in the USA to obtain
    reliable power, IP/transit, and secure raised floor space than Ashburn
    VA.

    There are a lot of good reasons to put your stuff there that were even
    stronger a decade or more ago when a lot of those hosting decisions were
    made. There are really good reasons why Amazon's us-east-1 region and
    their original S3 storage was there, entirely technical reasons.

    Some of them:

    1. It's no longer the cheapest region for power, etc., but it is still
    very cheap, particularly compared to, say, New York or New Jersey.
    2. It's very close to where most of the people in the United States live,
    which matters a lot for latency.
    3. Huge amounts of legacy infrastructure is based there, going all the way
    back to ARPANET, so it's very easy to get peering (this is changing
    over time).
    4. It's physically close to Wall Street, which is a huge central point for
    network infrastructure, without actually being in Wall Street and
    having to pay the costs designed for algorithmic trading.

    It was only very recently that Amazon started pushing us-east-2 in Ohio,
    and basically everyone in the first round of businesses that hosted on AWS
    have significant infrastructure in us-east-1.

    I think people reach a little too far for conspiracy theories about stuff
    like this. The reason why the national government, Wall Street, the CIA
    and NSA, the FBI, a bunch of network infrastructure, tons of ISPs, and
    tons of servers are all in the same place is because that's where all the people lived in the early United States and therefore that's where all the cities were and it's still where the major population centers of the
    United States cluster. Obviously, California, Texas, and Florida are
    changing that, but there's a ton of momentum behind those patterns and I believe the imbalance of US residents towards the eastern time zone is
    still quite large.

    Virginia actively tried to be the cheap state close enough to all the
    expensive states but far enough away that you're not paying the expensive
    state premium, and that worked really well for them.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Thu Jul 20 19:04:10 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 20, 2023 at 1:55:56 PM CDT, "Russ Allbery" <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

    There are far cheaper geographical locations in the USA to obtain
    reliable power, IP/transit, and secure raised floor space than Ashburn
    VA.

    There are a lot of good reasons to put your stuff there that were even stronger a decade or more ago when a lot of those hosting decisions were made. There are really good reasons why Amazon's us-east-1 region and
    their original S3 storage was there, entirely technical reasons.

    Some of them:

    1. It's no longer the cheapest region for power, etc., but it is still
    very cheap, particularly compared to, say, New York or New Jersey.
    2. It's very close to where most of the people in the United States live,
    which matters a lot for latency.
    3. Huge amounts of legacy infrastructure is based there, going all the way
    back to ARPANET, so it's very easy to get peering (this is changing
    over time).
    4. It's physically close to Wall Street, which is a huge central point for
    network infrastructure, without actually being in Wall Street and
    having to pay the costs designed for algorithmic trading.

    It was only very recently that Amazon started pushing us-east-2 in Ohio,
    and basically everyone in the first round of businesses that hosted on AWS have significant infrastructure in us-east-1.

    I think people reach a little too far for conspiracy theories about stuff like this. The reason why the national government, Wall Street, the CIA
    and NSA, the FBI, a bunch of network infrastructure, tons of ISPs, and
    tons of servers are all in the same place is because that's where all the people lived in the early United States and therefore that's where all the cities were and it's still where the major population centers of the
    United States cluster. Obviously, California, Texas, and Florida are changing that, but there's a ton of momentum behind those patterns and I believe the imbalance of US residents towards the eastern time zone is
    still quite large.

    Virginia actively tried to be the cheap state close enough to all the expensive states but far enough away that you're not paying the expensive state premium, and that worked really well for them.

    I absolutely accept all of that, you're right, many of us reach pretty far.

    However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there is based on common financial benefit of them
    all living/exchanging the feed there than dispersed over transit providers.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to Adam H. Kerman on Thu Jul 20 18:41:08 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 20, 2023 at 10:44:34 AM CDT, ""Adam H. Kerman"" <ahk@chinet.com> wrote:

    Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> wrote:
    Am 20.07.2023 um 13:24:19 Uhr schrieb Jesse Rehmer:

    I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet
    providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
    handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
    near the NSA.

    Is there a specific (legal) reason for that?

    Lots of communications infrastructure and power to serve Fort Meade?
    Seems like the right place to site a server farm.

    I have no substantial evidence to support what I'm about to throw out here,
    and it is my own wild speculation.

    There are far cheaper geographical locations in the USA to obtain reliable power, IP/transit, and secure raised floor space than Ashburn VA. US-based commercial Usenet providers' corporations are not based out of Virginia (last
    I checked most were based out of Florida and one in Texas). In the USA, before full-feed Usenet turned into a commercial venture, providers were spread out and their infrastructure lived close to their headquarters. To my knowledge
    (in this area it is more limited), there are no longer any non-commercial entities exchanging a full Usenet feed in the USA, perhaps apart from a few research facilities.

    Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which the US government
    semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?

    (Let's not kid ourselves, I know the full-feed Usenet operators are swimming
    in such content, and I don't believe anyone is paying for Usenet access to text-based discussion or share family photos.)

    I'm not convinced the US government doesn't want Usenet and the commercial Usenet providers to exist, contrary to what some lawmakers have stated in the past, but instead could care less about the profits made as long as the providers are cooperating with the surveillance and whatever is required for prosecution of end-users/bad actors/criminals/etc.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Adam H. Kerman@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Thu Jul 20 20:06:53 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

    However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense
    that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia
    and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what
    happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the
    Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full
    feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there
    is based on common financial benefit of them all living/exchanging the
    feed there than dispersed over transit providers.

    So, there's this really common phenomenon in economics where certain
    places become the center of a particular type of industry for reasons that >aren't really obvious. Usually there's *some* initial impetus, but it's >often minor and doesn't explain the level of concentration. (For
    instance, for Virginia, doubtless it got a head start because of ARPANET.) >For example, why are all the movie studios in Los Angeles, or all the tech >companies in San Francisco and San Jose (and now Seattle and Austin, but >still not, say, San Antonio or Phoenix), or all the banks in New York?

    Movie production is in Los Angeles because that's about as far from New
    York as you could get a century ago, without sending the black sheep
    brothers in the family to China, the ones exiled from New York to run
    several of the studios. The other brothers stayed in New York to raise
    money.

    There's also reliable sunshine.

    For a few years, in early days, there was a number of movie studios in
    Chicago, but that would not last.

    . . .

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to Jesse Rehmer on Thu Jul 20 12:37:14 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

    However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense
    that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia
    and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what
    happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the
    Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full
    feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there
    is based on common financial benefit of them all living/exchanging the
    feed there than dispersed over transit providers.

    So, there's this really common phenomenon in economics where certain
    places become the center of a particular type of industry for reasons that aren't really obvious. Usually there's *some* initial impetus, but it's
    often minor and doesn't explain the level of concentration. (For
    instance, for Virginia, doubtless it got a head start because of ARPANET.)
    For example, why are all the movie studios in Los Angeles, or all the tech companies in San Francisco and San Jose (and now Seattle and Austin, but
    still not, say, San Antonio or Phoenix), or all the banks in New York?

    Standard economic theory says that a lot of this is due to network
    effects. Once there is an industry concentration in an area, it tends to become more concentrated because it's just so convenient. In northern Virginia, there are a bunch of well-established data facility companies
    that know how to run data facilities and are competing with each other.
    There is a huge trained local population of data center workers so it's
    easy to hire techs. All the local power equipment and installation
    companies do data center work so they're good at it. There are a bunch of local HVAC companies that know how to cool data centers. There's a big
    Dell service center right there to repair your servers and they have all
    the parts. All the servers are already there so the transatlantic cables terminate there because why not. Etc.

    If you start out as some small business back in the day when that meant physical servers (these days, everyone just starts on AWS or GCS or
    Azure), you probably want those servers close by because you're going
    there yourself to fix them. So you start with some local hosting provider wherever you are physically located.

    But then if you succeed and grow, suppose that you want to provide a high-bandwidth service, and you want it to be low latency for the majority
    of the US population while still having reasonable latency to Europe and
    the rest of the US. Where do you rent a data center? You're a US company
    and don't want to deal with international corporate law, so Toronto is
    out. What are the other options?

    Virginia looks really good, and ten years ago looked even better. That's
    where all the expertise is, it's centrally located for both the US and
    Europe, there's a lot of market competition so you can shop around, it's
    close to all the peering... looks great. Sure, you can probably get
    cheaper buildings in, oh, Charleston, South Carolina or Louisville,
    Kentucky or whatever, but that supporting network of specialization isn't there. You could go to Miami, but that's both probably not cheap and also
    you have to worry about hurricane-related disruptions. You could do Pittsburgh, or Ohio, or whatever, but Virginia is really appealing.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Thu Jul 20 20:09:48 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 20, 2023 at 2:37:14 PM CDT, "Russ Allbery" <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:

    However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense
    that commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia
    and migrated elsewhere, versus the other way around, which is what
    happened with the full Usenet feed? Today you've got to be on the
    Equinix IX in Ashburn to convince anyone to give you a full
    feed. Perhaps the consolidation of Usenet services/feeds exchanged there
    is based on common financial benefit of them all living/exchanging the
    feed there than dispersed over transit providers.

    So, there's this really common phenomenon in economics where certain
    places become the center of a particular type of industry for reasons that aren't really obvious. Usually there's *some* initial impetus, but it's often minor and doesn't explain the level of concentration. (For
    instance, for Virginia, doubtless it got a head start because of ARPANET.) For example, why are all the movie studios in Los Angeles, or all the tech companies in San Francisco and San Jose (and now Seattle and Austin, but still not, say, San Antonio or Phoenix), or all the banks in New York?

    Standard economic theory says that a lot of this is due to network
    effects. Once there is an industry concentration in an area, it tends to become more concentrated because it's just so convenient. In northern Virginia, there are a bunch of well-established data facility companies
    that know how to run data facilities and are competing with each other.
    There is a huge trained local population of data center workers so it's
    easy to hire techs. All the local power equipment and installation
    companies do data center work so they're good at it. There are a bunch of local HVAC companies that know how to cool data centers. There's a big
    Dell service center right there to repair your servers and they have all
    the parts. All the servers are already there so the transatlantic cables terminate there because why not. Etc.

    If you start out as some small business back in the day when that meant physical servers (these days, everyone just starts on AWS or GCS or
    Azure), you probably want those servers close by because you're going
    there yourself to fix them. So you start with some local hosting provider wherever you are physically located.

    But then if you succeed and grow, suppose that you want to provide a high-bandwidth service, and you want it to be low latency for the majority
    of the US population while still having reasonable latency to Europe and
    the rest of the US. Where do you rent a data center? You're a US company and don't want to deal with international corporate law, so Toronto is
    out. What are the other options?

    Virginia looks really good, and ten years ago looked even better. That's where all the expertise is, it's centrally located for both the US and Europe, there's a lot of market competition so you can shop around, it's close to all the peering... looks great. Sure, you can probably get
    cheaper buildings in, oh, Charleston, South Carolina or Louisville,
    Kentucky or whatever, but that supporting network of specialization isn't there. You could go to Miami, but that's both probably not cheap and also you have to worry about hurricane-related disruptions. You could do Pittsburgh, or Ohio, or whatever, but Virginia is really appealing.

    Excellent points.

    I don't know why, but the one thing I've completely overlooked until you pointed out, having the transatlantic peering points there may be a big draw since most of the commercial Usenet providers are now also operating in parts of Europe, or exchanging feeds directly with the European providers, so that makes a lot of sense.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John Levine@21:1/5 to All on Thu Jul 20 21:47:42 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    According to Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com>:
    However, with everything you said, wouldn't it seem to make more sense that >commercial Usenet operators would have first started in Virginia and migrated >elsewhere, versus the other way around, which ...

    which, as previously noted, never happened.

    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John Levine@21:1/5 to jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com on Thu Jul 20 21:39:29 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
    Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
    relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
    they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.

    There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
    delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
    court cases on this very topic.

    I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet providers >in the United States - their servers and infrastructure handling Usenet feeds >are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities near the NSA.

    The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
    surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't
    looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?

    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John Levine@21:1/5 to mo01@posteo.de on Thu Jul 20 21:42:38 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    It appears that Marco Moock <mo01@posteo.de> said:
    Am 20.07.2023 um 13:24:19 Uhr schrieb Jesse Rehmer:

    I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet
    providers in the United States - their servers and infrastructure
    handling Usenet feeds are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities
    near the NSA.

    Is there a specific (legal) reason for that?

    Since it's not true, probably not.

    I expect some are in Ashburn since that's where vast numbers of cloud
    providers are. The NSA is in Ft Meade, 50 miles away, but why let
    facts get in the way of a good conspiracy theory?

    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to John Levine on Fri Jul 21 01:33:03 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 20, 2023 at 4:39:29 PM CDT, "John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

    It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
    Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
    relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how
    they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.

    There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
    delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
    court cases on this very topic.

    I can tell you one VERY interesting FACT about all commercial Usenet providers
    in the United States - their servers and infrastructure handling Usenet feeds
    are located in Ashburn Virginia, in facilities near the NSA.

    The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
    surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?

    From https://giganews.com/peering:

    We will only exchange full binary feeds with peers who enter into settlement free network peering with us. We are currently able to peer in the following facilities:
    Equinix, Ashburn, VA (ASN 30094) – direct cross-connect required
    AMS-IX, Amsterdam, NL (ASN 30094)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to John Levine on Thu Jul 20 20:13:21 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:

    Re that decaode old web page claiming they're an FBI front, if you read
    it with your brain turned on it was clear that they were doing something
    with the FBI to try and catch people distributing CSAM, which is not the
    same thing as being an FBI front.

    I suspect this is not uncommon because it makes a lot of sense given how
    CSAM trading rings work. From the perspective of the provider, their
    service is being abused by an organized criminal gang, and they've
    probably only sure about a small fraction of the activity because that's
    how anti-abuse measures usually work. But they probably have enough data
    to connect a series of accounts that *might* be part of the same activity, which they can't prove that without police powers to subpoena other ISP records, etc.

    So they turn that all over to the FBI and the FBI maybe says "don't do
    anything for a moment, let us get some more data and see if we can roll up
    the entire gang rather than just pick off some low-hanging fruit." If it works, the FBI gets to arrest a whole bunch of people at once and the
    provider gets an entire organized *network* off their service in a way
    that makes it less likely to crop up again, *and* they get a reputation as
    a dangerous place to do CSAM trading. From their perspective, it's a
    nearly ideal outcome.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From John Levine@21:1/5 to jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com on Fri Jul 21 02:19:19 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
    The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
    surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't
    looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?

    From https://giganews.com/peering:

    We will only exchange full binary feeds with peers who enter into settlement >free network peering with us. We are currently able to peer in the following >facilities:
    Equinix, Ashburn, VA (ASN 30094) – direct cross-connect required
    AMS-IX, Amsterdam, NL (ASN 30094)

    For reasons everyeone else has explained, it's not surprising they
    have a point of presence in Ashburn, since that's where everyone else
    is and it is a whole lot cheaper to peer with a bunch of people at an
    IX than one at a time with separate links.

    But the company is mostly in Texas and always has been.

    Re that decaode old web page claiming they're an FBI front, if you
    read it with your brain turned on it was clear that they were doing
    something with the FBI to try and catch people distributing CSAM,
    which is not the same thing as being an FBI front. Again, considering
    how big they are, it's not very surprising the FBI would ask them to
    do that.

    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to John Levine on Fri Jul 21 03:39:04 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 20, 2023 at 9:19:19 PM CDT, "John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com> wrote:

    It appears that Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> said:
    The guy who runs Giganews, which is located in Texas, will be
    surprised to hear that someone moved his data cernter while he wasn't
    looking. Who knew the NSA was so crafty?

    From https://giganews.com/peering:

    We will only exchange full binary feeds with peers who enter into settlement >> free network peering with us. We are currently able to peer in the following >> facilities:
    Equinix, Ashburn, VA (ASN 30094) – direct cross-connect required
    AMS-IX, Amsterdam, NL (ASN 30094)

    For reasons everyeone else has explained, it's not surprising they
    have a point of presence in Ashburn, since that's where everyone else
    is and it is a whole lot cheaper to peer with a bunch of people at an
    IX than one at a time with separate links.

    But the company is mostly in Texas and always has been.

    Re that decaode old web page claiming they're an FBI front, if you
    read it with your brain turned on it was clear that they were doing
    something with the FBI to try and catch people distributing CSAM,
    which is not the same thing as being an FBI front. Again, considering
    how big they are, it's not very surprising the FBI would ask them to
    do that.

    I agree, the "FBI front" claim as a whole is a stretch; however, from what I know about where and how full binary feeds are being exchanged today, it is
    not far-fetched to believe the operators may be allowed the privilege of operating with minimal interference from law enforcement for the privilege of "eavesdropping" or other high-level cooperative efforts.

    Commercial Usenet operators adhere to DMCA in the USA, but that doesn't cover CSAM or other illegal content outside of copyright. If Usenet providers are
    not monitoring and detecting CSAM or other illegal content, it makes sense to me that the only other invested and capable party would be law enforcement at the national level. Encryption and obfuscation are the most common way binary data is posted to Usenet today, so there likely has to be a high level of cooperation between the providers and law enforcement on access to the content as well as ease of tracing back to the origin. Within the realm of monitoring and tracing, again, I find it not far-fetched to believe the government would provide their own "employees" to perform this work for the providers whom may or may not be financial/technically able to do so on their own.

    I'm not making any proclamations about GigaNews or other Usenet providers and their relationship with law enforcement, but pointing out interesting coincidences that did not exist when larger numbers of Usenet operators were exchanging full feeds and within the USA specifically, the Usenet network was far more decentralized. Full feed exchange has become completely centralized within the USA to the Ashburn EQ-IX (as best I can tell since Altopia shut down, their infrastructure is still sort of in play, assume someone purchased it and may be reselling, but the alt.net Path element goes in/out Ashburn
    based on my inflow data). The consolidation to the Ashburn area did not happen until ISPs and other entities dropped full feeds when Usenet became a dirty word, also around the same time law enforcement became highly interested in monitoring it and other Internet traffic on a large scale.

    I like to speculate, and am distrustful of the government and service
    providers (having been on the inside for enough time), so why would GigaNews operate servers in Texas or anywhere else for that matter, when their feeds
    are exchanged exclusively in Ashburn? Backhauling 200-400TB of traffic per day over IX or similar cheaper transit links, is not usually efficient or cost effective, especially if the majority of your IP traffic originates in/out a location hundreds of miles away. They may have some redundancy where they are storing data outside of Ashburn, but replicating the entire feed and keeping any kind of retention in multiple locations seems very cost prohibitive for businesses claiming to operate on thin profit margins. HighWinds Network
    Group, in my opinion, has been the leader in Usenet from an infrastructure and network architecture standpoint. They have a vast global network that they primarily own and operate themselves, but again, their Usenet feeds are exchanged in Ashburn within the USA and their other Usenet server farm is in Amsterdam. If the largest global player isn't replicating beyond their two primary points of presence, I doubt GigaNews would be capable from a cost standpoint alone.

    GigaNews's AS and associated prefixes are currently only announced from Deft's network (out of Chicago from my perspective) and the two IXs in Ashburn VA and Frankfurt Germany. It seems very recently they lost many IP peers and prefix announcements, but maybe they sold off old parts of the business unrelated to GigaNews. From a network/service provider perspective, they are the most
    opaque of the bunch operating in the USA in terms of exactly how they operate, and they haven't answered an e-mail sent to their peering address in over 4 years from myself and other operators I am in contact with attempting to peer or adjust feeds with them.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Richard Kettlewell@21:1/5 to Jesse Rehmer on Fri Jul 21 08:42:00 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
    Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose
    profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and
    pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which
    the US government semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?

    The NSA and their peers are quite capable of taking an NNTP feed like
    anyone else, why would they care about the location of other Usenet
    providers?

    --
    https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to invalid@invalid.invalid on Fri Jul 21 10:59:59 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Jul 21, 2023 at 2:42:00 AM CDT, "Richard Kettlewell" <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
    Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose
    profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and
    pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which
    the US government semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?

    The NSA and their peers are quite capable of taking an NNTP feed like
    anyone else, why would they care about the location of other Usenet providers?

    Why would they trust anyone to hand them a potentially filtered feed for surveillance?

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Richard Kettlewell@21:1/5 to John Levine on Fri Jul 21 16:54:47 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    John Levine <johnl@taugh.com> writes:
    Meanwhile AFAIK binary groups still exist today, there’s just a
    relatively limited set of providers who carry them. I don’t know how >>> they escape being sued into obvlivion by copyright holders.

    There's no secret. They act on the DMCA notices they receive and
    delete the offending articles. I've been a technical expert in some
    court cases on this very topic.

    I’m not very familiar with US law. The reason I’m puzzled is that the
    point of carrying binary groups is, rather obviously, to facilitate
    large-scale copyright violation, not some more innocuous pursuit that
    happens to be troubled by the occasional pirated movie.

    Can you really get away with that (at least in the USA) as long as you
    respond to notices from the rights holders who actually bother to check?
    If so then how is it that Napster was destroyed?

    (Has it not occurred to anyone to automate ‘NNTP to DMCA notice’?)

    --
    https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Richard Kettlewell@21:1/5 to Jesse Rehmer on Fri Jul 21 16:47:59 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
    "Richard Kettlewell" <invalid@invalid.invalid> wrote:
    Jesse Rehmer <jesse.rehmer@blueworldhosting.com> writes:
    Don't you think it is highly curious that service providers whose
    profits center around the exchange of copyrighted material and
    pornography are all located in the one geographical location in which
    the US government semi-openly admits is their largest spy point?

    The NSA and their peers are quite capable of taking an NNTP feed like
    anyone else, why would they care about the location of other Usenet
    providers?

    Why would they trust anyone to hand them a potentially filtered feed
    for surveillance?

    Easy risk to mitigate: take multiple feeds, use a front organization,
    etc.

    If a peer does start filtering then that represents an interesting line
    of investigation l-)

    --
    https://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com on Sun Jul 23 17:09:11 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Standing in court yelling MATH WILL ALWAYS WIN is very emotionally
    satisfying, but weirdly it doesn't make the court judgment go away.
    Maybe the lawyers won't be able to ignore the realities of math
    forever, but they do in fact get to ignore the realities of math long
    enough to tell the men with guns to go take your money.

    That’s a nice straw man scenario, but it bears no relation to the argument I was making. Laws are but one means to an end, and bad laws do *not* do what they’re supposed to be doing (and fuel the conspiracy theories that their “unintended consequences” were actually intended the whole time).

    You don't seem to understand my point. This whole thread started with
    talking about news administration and with you being upset that people
    aren't carrying binaries. The point that I and several other people are
    making is that carrying binaries creates legal hassles. Now you're saying
    the laws are bad.

    The laws may or may not be bad, but my point is that it doesn't matter.
    The people enforcing the laws do not give a single shit what your opinion,
    or my opinion, of the laws are. All of these arguments about whether the
    laws work or not are therefore entirely beside the point. I think use of
    at least some currently illegal drugs should be legalized and a lot of
    drug laws are very bad and counterproductive; that doesn't mean I'm going
    to start selling drugs while drugs are illegal.

    The laws are a constraint on how people run their servers (this is sort of
    the definition of laws). If you think the laws should change so that
    carrying binaries wouldn't pose legal risk, go get them changed and then
    let us know. Until then, we have to start with the laws the way that they
    are right now, whether we like them or not, which makes carrying binaries rather risky unless you have a lot of expensive infrastructure in place to
    deal with the highly predictable consequences.

    You can instead that Usenet server operators should engage in coordinated
    civil disobedience because the laws are bad, but, well, good luck with
    that. I'm not interested, at least.

    Regardless, my point remains that people wanted a “one stop shop” for their group chat messages, which were increasingly becoming non-text. Binaries being segregated like they are is both inconvenient and made
    them easy to drop completely.

    Sure. I agree with that. What I'm pointing out is *why* they were
    segregated and why to this day you're going to have an extremely hard time convincing anyone who doesn't have a lot of resources and a legal and anti-abuse team to unsegregate them, or carry them at all.

    (There are a bunch of other problems with Usenet being that one stop shop,
    too, but we'll stick with that one for now.)

    I also disagree that this is what killed Usenet in large part because the phenomenon you describe about wanting non-text messages is newer than when Usenet started running into trouble. I've not been around Usenet as long
    as some of the folks here, but I've been using Usenet since 1993, and I
    can tell you from personal experience that although copyright and legality issues around binaries did show up early, Usenet had a mostly working way
    of dealing with that and was still going very strong with widely-used text discussion groups until the spamming (and off-topic trolling and other
    types of unwanted messages that are even harder to moderate) took off.
    That was the challenge that was happening about the time that other social media platforms started taking off, and that's when usage of Usenet
    started dropping and the signal to noise ratio started dropping even
    faster.

    That spam was directly the cause of Usenet's decline is just my opinion
    and there are a few other viable theories. But most of them are some
    version of Usenet being outcompeted by other protocols that people found
    easier to use and less annoying for whatever reason, whether that be
    better moderation (my theory), better *text* message formatting, better
    client software, better topic organization, shorter messages, more
    convenient access, cost, etc. Or of course maybe a combination of all of
    those things.

    But I'm dubious that it was *primarily* about non-text content because of
    the timing. Usenet's problems started back in the late 1990s and very
    early 2000s, long before the iPhone, which is when non-text chat started
    taking off for the average person. There certainly was some demand for photographs around the time that Facebook started, and Usenet has always
    been bad at that (even apart from the separate binary groups, Usenet
    *software* has always been bad), so maybe it was a factor, but I think it
    was too early for it to be the main factor.

    *Now*, *today*, I agree with you that this is a huge missing feature if
    one wanted Usenet to compete with, say, Tiktok, although there is also a
    huge list of other features that Usenet is missing, one of which is (for
    all that people love to complain about the algorithms) adaptive moderation
    so that people can very quickly filter out shit they don't want to see.

    What killed Usenet was that it had no solution for spam that actually
    worked for the average person, only complicated and weird filtering
    experiments that never quite worked right.

    There isn’t a single platform without spam problems, so it is ludicrous to suggest that people abandoned Usenet for some spam-free social network.

    The large commercial social media services have whole teams of people,
    often thousands of people, who are actually paid (admittedly often very
    poorly) to get rid of spam and abuse. Usenet had a handful of volunteers
    and a janky cancel system and therefore had a spam problem that became
    orders of magnitude worse than the user experience on other social media services. People will tolerate a small amount of visible spam. Usenet
    did not have a small amount of spam problem.

    Even so, there were tools that could have been brought to bear to
    greatly reduce the problem (Hello, UDP!), and I can only speculate on
    why the abuse wasn’t policed (insert your favorite conspiracy theory
    here).

    Well, I was actually here then. UDP was used, and it didn't work. It
    didn't greatly reduce the problem. The Usenet protocol makes that type of enforcement nearly impossible, the amount of work required is
    considerable, some sites that were sources of significant percentages of
    the wanted articles were also sources of significant amounts of spam and
    there was no consensus to cut them off, and what was able to be done was completely unsustainable with a group of volunteers with no legal
    protections and constant ongoing harassment. Due to the way Usenet works, there was no governance system *capable* of making decisions; it was essentially a free-for-all, which didn't work.

    The same mechanism that was used for UDPs was also then used for denial of service attacks, making it hard to run a service with those mechanisms
    enabled, and no one managed to get an authenticated protocol really
    working, in part due to the constant disagreement over who should have the right to moderate Usenet. There were experiments with NoCeM (and indeed
    there are ongoing experiments with NoCeM), but they never took off.

    Yep, and that’s why it was a mistake to not actually solve those
    problems decades ago.

    I would also like to have cold fusion and perfectly efficient solar
    panels. Doing spam control in a highly distributed system with no central authority in the face of active harassment is very hard! Doing it with
    almost no income stream to pay people is nearly impossible. Putting aside
    the individual message moderation and focusing only on the necessary adversarial software work, good platform abuse people are not cheap, and
    it's not the sort of job that you do for free. It's not something you implement once; it's something that you come in and do each day, every
    day, against human adversaries who are adapting to your defenses. It's
    not a *hobby*, which is part of why all the spam cancellers burned out.

    It's quite hard even *with* the advantages that other social media
    services have, such as central authentication and complete IP logging and
    paid moderators. One could argue that a lot of them are still failing at controlling spam, and Usenet is playing on a much harder mode.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Doc O'Leary ,@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Sun Jul 23 23:19:53 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    For your reference, records indicate that
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Standing in court yelling MATH WILL ALWAYS WIN is very emotionally satisfying, but weirdly it doesn't make the court judgment go away. Maybe the lawyers won't be able to ignore the realities of math forever, but
    they do in fact get to ignore the realities of math long enough to tell
    the men with guns to go take your money.

    That’s a nice straw man scenario, but it bears no relation to the argument
    I was making. Laws are but one means to an end, and bad laws do *not* do
    what they’re supposed to be doing (and fuel the conspiracy theories that their “unintended consequences” were actually intended the whole time). None of the legal measures put in place have stopped copyright
    infringement, kiddie porn, or a host of other problematic data that exists
    on the Internet. In the end, Usenet was made irrelevant, and my only
    interest here is to find out if that can be fixed.

    This is a bizarrely confused history of Usenet. The binary groups were
    going strong for years after the text groups were dying.

    Well, they’re *still* “going strong” if you look at their increasing traffic. But that argument is disingenuous unless you’re trying to say
    that the binaries posted have been “legitimate” messages, like people posting silly cat videos or whatever.

    By that logic, Usenet is not dead, because traffic to those binary groups
    has been increasing steadily over time! But Usenet *is* dead, because
    those binary groups are *not* full of people sharing their own content.

    Regardless, my point remains that people wanted a “one stop shop” for their group chat messages, which were increasingly becoming non-text. Binaries
    being segregated like they are is both inconvenient and made them easy to
    drop completely. If Usenet can’t even support messages that *email*
    supports in 2023, what’s the point?

    What killed
    Usenet was that it had no solution for spam that actually worked for the average person, only complicated and weird filtering experiments that
    never quite worked right.

    There isn’t a single platform without spam problems, so it is ludicrous to suggest that people abandoned Usenet for some spam-free social network.
    Even so, there were tools that could have been brought to bear to greatly reduce the problem (Hello, UDP!), and I can only speculate on why the
    abuse wasn’t policed (insert your favorite conspiracy theory here).

    Spoiler: Still has exactly the same problems. Usenet is just too dead for spammers to care about it (mostly). If it were ever revived, the same problem would immediately come back.

    Yep, and that’s why it was a mistake to not actually solve those problems decades ago.

    --
    "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
    River Tam, Trash, Firefly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Doc O'Leary ,@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Mon Jul 24 00:12:52 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    For your reference, records indicate that
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    However, I personally would rather juggle raw plutonium than spend any
    time handling that kind of legal evidence and therefore opt out of the
    entire problem by not carrying binaries, since otherwise I am legally obligated to spend whatever time it takes me to handle that data properly should any problem arise.

    And that makes perfect sense, and *that* is why the world is so messed up.
    The law creates an undue burden on the very people who could be providing
    the evidence of criminal activity, driving the criminals into more and more secret ways to further their criminal enterprise.

    Same thing happened with Craigslist and prostitutes, I believe. It wasn’t “Yay, let’s use this resource to catch the bad guys!” It was “You’re a bad
    guy if a bad guy does bad things with you.” Classic victim blaming.

    Since personally I don't care about any of the
    binaries anyway (there are numerous better sources for any non-textual information I want than Usenet)

    Well, sure, *now* that the damage is done! Google would love you to go to YouTube to get ad-supported videos. Amazon would be happy to have you get
    your favorite podcasts exclusively from their servers.
    So much . . . better?

    You
    would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear, and, well, good luck with that.

    We must be on different Internets. The one I’m on doesn’t have “opponents”. It has connections between myself and other people I want
    to engage with. What the hell kind of network have you set up for
    yourself that maintains connections to people who are out to do you harm?

    You can do various things to make it easier and various things to make it harder. One of the most effective things you can do to make dealing with abuse easier is to ban all non-textual media, because that takes a lot of
    the most annoying, dangerous, or horrific types of abuse off the table.

    See above. I don’t connect with people who push that kind of stuff. The content type is irrelevant. Sounds like you’re still not looking to solve the right problems.

    I wanted to say that this is definitely not true, but I think I can see
    how one might see that this is true from a particular angle. It is true
    that in pursuit of profits, a bunch of companies have built network
    platforms that make abuse much easier, and are now desperately trying to
    play catch-up to filter out the shit that they don't want to carry.

    Ha, no. Their abuse policies reflect their true intentions. They
    discourage reporting by making you jump through so many hoops. They say upfront you, the abused, MUST do certain things or they’re going to
    ignore you. If they don’t reject you outright, your “response” will be that they’ll take action *they* deem appropriate.

    But if you mean the cloud providers are happy about or actively encourage people doing evil shit like CSAM on their platforms, this is absolutely
    100% not true and I know it's not true from direct personal experience.

    My personal experience says otherwise. Nobody is kicking their paying customers to the curb unless they’re forced to.

    Cloud platforms spend large quantities of money, hire whole teams of very expensive people, and write whole new algorithms and scanning methods to
    try to get rid of shit like CSAM.

    I have never been compensated one penny for any of the abuse that any cloud provider has sent my way. Usenet never sent me any article I never asked for (although I have requested some I ended up not wanting :-).

    --
    "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
    River Tam, Trash, Firefly

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Todd M. McComb@21:1/5 to eagle@eyrie.org on Mon Jul 24 00:42:45 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    In article <87cz0i8920.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>,
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
    ... Usenet had a mostly working way of dealing with that and was
    still going very strong with widely-used text discussion groups
    until the spamming (and off-topic trolling and other types of
    unwanted messages that are even harder to moderate) took off.

    I never found spam per se to be that big of an issue on Usenet --
    although admittedly I had/have other people doing a lot of the work
    on my behalf.

    And you focus on "spam" in your further comments in the quoted post,
    while I think these "off-topic trolling and other types of unwanted
    messages that are even harder to moderate" is actually more on the
    mark. The general anti-social behavior.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com on Sun Jul 23 17:38:40 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    You would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear,
    and, well, good luck with that.

    We must be on different Internets. The one I’m on doesn’t have “opponents”. It has connections between myself and other people I want to engage with. What the hell kind of network have you set up for
    yourself that maintains connections to people who are out to do you
    harm?

    Uh... Usenet? Usenet is that network? This is the entire way that it
    works? People post articles that are flood-filled through a network?
    They are therefore present on servers with no direct connection with the
    person who posted it?

    The whole point of Usenet is to talk about things with strangers.
    Protocols for talking to strangers are inherently vulnerable to abusive strangers and thus tend to have serious problems unless they're moderated
    in some fashion. This is, like, social media 101. If I were only
    connecting to people I want to engage with, I wouldn't have any of your articles and we wouldn't be having this discussion. :)

    https://xkcd.com/386/

    More generally, this is inherently the challenge of *any* form of
    community forum or commons. If something is intended to be open to
    everyone by default unless they have done something wrong, some number of
    those people will try to use it to do harm, and then one has to build some
    sort of system that prevents or mitigates that harm by filtering it out or removing those people. This is *inherently unavoidable*, and it's also *inherently adversarial*. Whatever moderation system you build will be
    tested by people who are trying to bypass it. And it's far more
    challenging to write those systems on the internet where there is no
    single authentication system (which would be bad to have for other
    reasons, anyway) and it is trivially easy to create new identities.

    But if you mean the cloud providers are happy about or actively
    encourage people doing evil shit like CSAM on their platforms, this is
    absolutely 100% not true and I know it's not true from direct personal
    experience.

    My personal experience says otherwise. Nobody is kicking their paying customers to the curb unless they’re forced to.

    Okay, well, this makes it clear to me that you have absolutely no idea
    what you're talking about and are just making things up based on your own prejudices. So probably much to everyone else's relief, I'll try to stop responding here, and you can have the last words.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Russ Allbery@21:1/5 to Todd M. McComb on Sun Jul 23 18:09:17 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    mccomb@medieval.org (Todd M. McComb) writes:

    And you focus on "spam" in your further comments in the quoted post,
    while I think these "off-topic trolling and other types of unwanted
    messages that are even harder to moderate" is actually more on the mark.
    The general anti-social behavior.

    Yeah, I think you're right. Particularly by the classic Usenet definition
    of spam, that was to some degree the easy bit.

    I don't think it was really under control (people tend to have a much
    lower tolerance than I do for spam, judging from people's reaction to
    email spam amounts that I would find trivial), but even if it was, the moderation problem was much harder to solve.

    Other protocols went with either a reputation system, human moderators who could delete stuff (as opposed to Usenet's awkward everything-or-nothing,
    no take-backs, easy-to-bypass system), or using the social graph as a moderation mechanism to filter what you see (or all three). There were attempts at the first two on Usenet, but the Usenet protocol and the lack
    of any central point of control makes it rather challenging.

    --
    Russ Allbery (eagle@eyrie.org) <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>

    Please post questions rather than mailing me directly.
    <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/questions.html> explains why.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Todd M. McComb@21:1/5 to eagle@eyrie.org on Mon Jul 24 01:53:07 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    In article <874jlu869u.fsf@hope.eyrie.org>,
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:
    ... the Usenet protocol and the lack of any central point of control
    makes it rather challenging.

    Before I go back to lurking, if only for others reading this, perhaps
    it's worth pointing out that what brought someone like me to Usenet
    (in the mid-80s) is exactly what amplifies these social issues:
    Aggregation. So it's great when it's possible to draw from specialists
    around the world in order to discuss a topic.... But we're "drawing
    from" all the sociopaths out there too, not that they're any more
    numerous than before, but they can all come here to disrupt others' conversations for whatever reasons they may have (which aren't only monetary...). In other words, it's a hobby & passion for many of
    the troublemakers, with all the energy that implies, as I'm sure
    you're aware.

    (Still, I also don't agree with any implication that the public
    made a good choice by abandoning this sort of system for for-profit, top-controlled platforms. It was an expedient choice, and predictably,
    isn't going well.)

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
  • From Richard@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jul 24 15:58:55 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    [Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

    mccomb@medieval.org (Todd M. McComb) spake the secret code <u9khe5$2ep$1@hope.eyrie.org> thusly:

    I never found spam per se to be that big of an issue on Usenet --

    It used to be, when lots of eyeballs were looking at usenet. Spam
    follows the eyeballs. Because usenet is largley ignored now, the spam
    problem has solved itself. Should usenet ever see a resurgence in
    usage by the average person, the spam will resurge at that time.
    --
    "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
    The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals-wiki.org>
    The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
    Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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  • From Richard@21:1/5 to All on Mon Jul 24 16:00:49 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    [Please do not mail me a copy of your followup]

    mccomb@medieval.org (Todd M. McComb) spake the secret code <u9kli3$4rs$1@hope.eyrie.org> thusly:

    Before I go back to lurking, if only for others reading this, perhaps
    it's worth pointing out that what brought someone like me to Usenet
    (in the mid-80s) is exactly what amplifies these social issues:
    Aggregation. So it's great when it's possible to draw from specialists >around the world in order to discuss a topic.... But we're "drawing
    from" all the sociopaths out there too [...]

    Agreed. The traditional solution was a moderated group, e.g. comp.lang.c++.moderated, to keep out the trolls. The C++ programming
    newsgroup remains somewhat active, but has the problem of trolls and
    nuiscance posters. We've discussed resurrecting the moderated group
    from time to time, but the whole moderation infrastructure on usenet
    appears to have fallen into disarray from lack of use.
    --
    "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" free book <http://tinyurl.com/d3d-pipeline>
    The Terminals Wiki <http://terminals-wiki.org>
    The Computer Graphics Museum <http://computergraphicsmuseum.org>
    Legalize Adulthood! (my blog) <http://legalizeadulthood.wordpress.com>

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  • From Todd M. McComb@21:1/5 to Richard on Mon Jul 24 16:38:54 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    In article <u9m77h$2lkb9$4@news.xmission.com>, Richard <> wrote:
    ... the whole moderation infrastructure on usenet appears to have
    fallen into disarray from lack of use.

    I'm one of the people who maintains the Usenet moderation system,
    and I assure you that it does work as before. Prospective moderators
    seem to have difficulty using the old (mostly shell-based) tools,
    so it can be an issue to find someone, but it's not an infrastructure
    problem.

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  • From Doc O'Leary ,@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Sun Jul 30 01:26:46 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    For your reference, records indicate that
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    You don't seem to understand my point. This whole thread started with talking about news administration and with you being upset that people
    aren't carrying binaries. The point that I and several other people are making is that carrying binaries creates legal hassles. Now you're saying the laws are bad.

    I’m not upset, I’m just drawing a connection between rolling over for bad laws and the demise of Usenet. I’m just saying it should be obvious why Usenet is not going to be the destination of people looking for an
    alternative to Twitter or Facebook. They face the same legal hassles, too.

    The laws may or may not be bad, but my point is that it doesn't matter.
    The people enforcing the laws do not give a single shit what your opinion,
    or my opinion, of the laws are. All of these arguments about whether the laws work or not are therefore entirely beside the point. I think use of
    at least some currently illegal drugs should be legalized and a lot of
    drug laws are very bad and counterproductive; that doesn't mean I'm going
    to start selling drugs while drugs are illegal.

    Again with straw man fantasies. All I’m saying is that the laws are a
    known factor, and solutions are to be had within their framework. But
    that’s not the direction Usenet went. And that’s why it’s a ghost town today.

    The laws are a constraint on how people run their servers (this is sort of the definition of laws). If you think the laws should change so that carrying binaries wouldn't pose legal risk, go get them changed and then
    let us know.

    Why go to the bother when it is clear that *no* binaries are going to be supported anyway? Again, you must *first* start supporting binaries in a practical manner before there is any point in making a distinction
    between legal and illegal data. I’m still looking to have that
    discussion. But if that’s a non-starter, the whole thing is moot, and
    people will use protocols other than NNTP to exchange their messages.

    Regardless, my point remains that people wanted a “one stop shop” for their group chat messages, which were increasingly becoming non-text. Binaries being segregated like they are is both inconvenient and made
    them easy to drop completely.

    Sure. I agree with that. What I'm pointing out is *why* they were segregated and why to this day you're going to have an extremely hard time convincing anyone who doesn't have a lot of resources and a legal and anti-abuse team to unsegregate them, or carry them at all.

    I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, excepting to have a
    technical discussion on what it will take to turn Usenet into a modern
    service. If nobody wants that, that’s fine, too, but then they shouldn’t turn around and wonder why most people go somewhere else to engage in
    group chats.

    I also disagree that this is what killed Usenet in large part because the phenomenon you describe about wanting non-text messages is newer than when Usenet started running into trouble.

    There was no one thing that did it, it was *all* the innovations that were happening with the Internet, yet Usenet experienced stagnation. Web forums took away a huge chuck of traffic long before anything had become “social media” yet. I maintain it was the ability to post messages with binary content. You go to a web site about classic cars (or whatever) and get the full multimedia experience.

    Usenet’s answer to that was, at first, “No, if you want to talk about cars you go to this one group, but if you want to post a picture of a cool car
    you saw at a show, you have to go to this other group (never mind the whole process of uploading and downloading) that has none of the conversation context. Oh, you have a *video* of the car, well now you need to go to an
    even *different* group and discover how much more of a pain large files
    are!” Then even that option went away.

    Yeah, spam was a bit of a problem, but it was another thing that was a
    problem on *all* platforms that got popular. Nobody fled Usenet for some platform that had solved the problem of abusive users. If anything, social media ramped up the toxicity in a way that made the hassles of Eternal September seem downright delightful!

    But I'm dubious that it was *primarily* about non-text content because of
    the timing.

    Yes, it was early, but it was very much a case of “the writing is on the wall”. Once people found the web, or once they received their first attachment in an email client that supported MIME, the die was cast. I
    forget if that was when I was stuck on a 2400 or 9600 baud modem, but the direction things were going was obvious to everyone but Usenet. And to
    be making the same sorts of arguments *today*, when I can get Gigabit
    fiber and 8TB hard drives for silly small sums of money? Ludicrous.

    some sites that were sources of significant percentages of
    the wanted articles were also sources of significant amounts of spam and there was no consensus to cut them off

    Yet another “roll over” approach that made Usenet weaker rather than stronger. Abuse is abuse; it’s not an equation to balance. I don’t care how many insightful posts might be coming from Google Groups; they are
    dead to me because they don’t do jack about the abuse. Same is true of anyone who tries to use human shields as an excuse for allowing their bad behavior.

    The same mechanism that was used for UDPs was also then used for denial of service attacks, making it hard to run a service with those mechanisms enabled, and no one managed to get an authenticated protocol really
    working, in part due to the constant disagreement over who should have the right to moderate Usenet.

    Everyone has that right; it’s decentralized! On a healthy network, if you don’t like what your upstream provider offers, use a different one. If *nobody* wants to read your messages, then it’s time for a little introspection.

    Yep, and that’s why it was a mistake to not actually solve those
    problems decades ago.

    I would also like to have cold fusion and perfectly efficient solar
    panels. Doing spam control in a highly distributed system with no central authority in the face of active harassment is very hard!

    I’m not saying it’s not. I’m just saying that all evidence points to Usenet
    being non-viable unless people *try* to solve these problems.

    Doing it with
    almost no income stream to pay people is nearly impossible.

    If that is true, then there is no point in being here. If the Internet has only become a playground for commercial interests, Usenet has no place to exist. I don’t think that’s true, but I am of the opinion that it is becoming *very* close to being true, if only because there are other open source efforts that aren’t stagnating and making excuses why it’s a good thing to be stuck in 1998.

    --
    "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
    River Tam, Trash, Firefly

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  • From Doc O'Leary ,@21:1/5 to Russ Allbery on Sun Jul 30 02:18:28 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    For your reference, records indicate that
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
    Russ Allbery <eagle@eyrie.org> wrote:

    You would have to make all of your opponents permanently disappear,
    and, well, good luck with that.

    We must be on different Internets. The one I’m on doesn’t have “opponents”. It has connections between myself and other people I want to engage with. What the hell kind of network have you set up for
    yourself that maintains connections to people who are out to do you
    harm?

    Uh... Usenet? Usenet is that network? This is the entire way that it
    works? People post articles that are flood-filled through a network?
    They are therefore present on servers with no direct connection with the person who posted it?

    There is as much connection as we choose to make. I identify myself in traditional ways in my headers. If need be, I could digitally sign my messages, or use any number of other methods to connect my posts to an identity. If all you’re saying is that Usenet is decades behind the
    times . . . yup.

    The whole point of Usenet is to talk about things with strangers.
    Protocols for talking to strangers are inherently vulnerable to abusive strangers and thus tend to have serious problems unless they're moderated
    in some fashion. This is, like, social media 101. If I were only
    connecting to people I want to engage with, I wouldn't have any of your articles and we wouldn't be having this discussion. :)

    Simply not true. There are all kinds of ways to establish connections
    with “strangers” that can provide an anonymous identity (if need be). Don’t act like the world hasn’t been making progress without Usenet.

    More generally, this is inherently the challenge of *any* form of
    community forum or commons. If something is intended to be open to
    everyone by default unless they have done something wrong, some number of those people will try to use it to do harm, and then one has to build some sort of system that prevents or mitigates that harm by filtering it out or removing those people. This is *inherently unavoidable*, and it's also *inherently adversarial*.

    Again, just not true. Perhaps that very framing is what prevents you from devising working solutions. Consider instead that there are no bad guys
    or, at the very least, there is no agreement on who the good guys are.

    Whatever moderation system you build will be
    tested by people who are trying to bypass it. And it's far more
    challenging to write those systems on the internet where there is no
    single authentication system (which would be bad to have for other
    reasons, anyway) and it is trivially easy to create new identities.

    Stop building shitty systems like that. On my Internet, being “tested” involves having an IP address, and there are a limited number of those,
    even with IPv6. Yeah, cloud providers have crapped things up enough to
    make it fairly easy to get a new IP address from them. My secret?
    Firewall their whole damn network. There’s absolutely no reason Usenet
    best practices couldn’t mandate that, and a slew of other anti-abuse
    measures that are easy and effective. Kiddie porn doesn’t just magically appear on anybody’s server.

    My personal experience says otherwise. Nobody is kicking their paying customers to the curb unless they’re forced to.

    Okay, well, this makes it clear to me that you have absolutely no idea
    what you're talking about and are just making things up based on your own prejudices. So probably much to everyone else's relief, I'll try to stop responding here, and you can have the last words.

    I appreciate that, I guess? Seems like a silly way to disengage, though,
    by acting like commercial interests aren’t hugely motivating factors, when
    in another post you were arguing that Usenet doesn’t have the money to
    tackle the problem of abuse! You have it all backwards. Spam simply would
    not exist if nobody took money to allow it to exist.

    --
    "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
    River Tam, Trash, Firefly

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  • From John@21:1/5 to droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com on Sun Jul 30 03:27:02 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> writes:
    Usenet’s answer to that was, at first, “No, if you want to talk about cars
    you go to this one group, but if you want to post a picture of a cool car
    you saw at a show, you have to go to this other group (never mind the whole process of uploading and downloading) that has none of the conversation context. Oh, you have a *video* of the car, well now you need to go to an even *different* group and discover how much more of a pain large files are!” Then even that option went away.


    I think it's a damn fool idea to flood the same 200MB video to 1,000
    different Usenet servers on the off chance that somebody might be
    reading alt.cars.ford.edsel and wants to watch it. Makes a lot more
    sense to post a link, be it to Youtube or some other hosting option (self-hosted if you're bold). If one wishes to be a grumpy protocol
    contrarian there's no reason it has to be an HTTP link either, by all
    means go wild and use FTP or gopher or 9p or *something* that makes more
    sense for distributing large files than the Net News Transport
    Protocol. Are links ephemeral? Yeah sure, but so are the expiration
    rules on Usenet servers, especially once you start bringing in binary
    posts.

    Your vaunted web forums usually don't host their own images or videos
    either, or if they do host images they are much restricted (1 image per
    post, max 200KB, only viewable by signed-in members etc.) Reddit famously outsourced image hosting to imgur and videos to sites like
    gfycat. Something Awful has image uploads but you can only do one per
    post, which led people to use outside hosts like Waffleimages (which
    went down and broke tons of threads) or photobucket (which changed its
    policies and broke tons of threads) or imgur (which deleted a bunch of
    images and broke tons of threads).


    john

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  • From =?UTF-8?Q?Julien_=c3=89LIE?=@21:1/5 to All on Sun Jul 30 13:53:10 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    Hi Jesse,

    GigaNews's AS and associated prefixes are currently only announced from Deft's
    network (out of Chicago from my perspective) and the two IXs in Ashburn VA and
    Frankfurt Germany. It seems very recently they lost many IP peers and prefix announcements, but maybe they sold off old parts of the business unrelated to GigaNews. From a network/service provider perspective, they are the most opaque of the bunch operating in the USA in terms of exactly how they operate,
    and they haven't answered an e-mail sent to their peering address in over 4 years from myself and other operators I am in contact with attempting to peer or adjust feeds with them.

    Strange that the Giganews folks don't even bother responding to their
    peers who ask them some feed adjustement. They claim to have a 24/7
    support team... but not for their peers! Maybe they should be contacted
    via their support team instead of their peering address?

    FWIW, in relation with this thread, they are using a special 451 NNTP
    response code when an article cannot be found because it was removed as
    part of a DMCA request:

    https://support.giganews.com/hc/en-us/articles/9952660678285-What-are-errors-430-and-451-


    This discussion is pretty interesting, and helped in improving my
    knowledge of the states and cities of the USA :)

    --
    Julien ÉLIE

    « – Connaissez-vous la différence entre l'ignorance et l'apathie ?
    – J'en sais rien et je m'en fous. »

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  • From The Doctor@21:1/5 to iulius@nom-de-mon-site.com.invalid on Sun Jul 30 12:40:04 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    In article <ua5iv6$ctmb$1@news.trigofacile.com>,
    Julien LIE <iulius@nom-de-mon-site.com.invalid> wrote:
    Hi Jesse,

    GigaNews's AS and associated prefixes are currently only announced from Deft's
    network (out of Chicago from my perspective) and the two IXs in Ashburn VA and
    Frankfurt Germany. It seems very recently they lost many IP peers and prefix >> announcements, but maybe they sold off old parts of the business unrelated to
    GigaNews. From a network/service provider perspective, they are the most
    opaque of the bunch operating in the USA in terms of exactly how they operate,
    and they haven't answered an e-mail sent to their peering address in over 4 >> years from myself and other operators I am in contact with attempting to peer
    or adjust feeds with them.

    Strange that the Giganews folks don't even bother responding to their
    peers who ask them some feed adjustement. They claim to have a 24/7
    support team... but not for their peers! Maybe they should be contacted
    via their support team instead of their peering address?

    FWIW, in relation with this thread, they are using a special 451 NNTP >response code when an article cannot be found because it was removed as
    part of a DMCA request:

    https://support.giganews.com/hc/en-us/articles/9952660678285-What-are-errors-430-and-451-


    This discussion is pretty interesting, and helped in improving my
    knowledge of the states and cities of the USA :)


    How sad!

    --
    Julien ÉLIE

    « – Connaissez-vous la différence entre l'ignorance et l'apathie ?
    – J'en sais rien et je m'en fous. »


    --
    Member - Liberal International This is doctor@nk.ca Ici doctor@nk.ca
    Yahweh, King & country!Never Satan President Republic!Beware AntiChrist rising! Look at Psalms 14 and 53 on Atheism https://www.empire.kred/ROOTNK?t=94a1f39b If they have not admitted their failures, they cannot have learned from them. -unknown Beware https://mindspring.com

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  • From Syber Shock@21:1/5 to droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com on Mon Jul 31 11:00:04 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Sun, 30 Jul 2023 01:26:46 -0000 (UTC)
    Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> wrote:

    I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything, excepting to have a technical discussion on what it will take to turn Usenet into a
    modern service.

    Something like this is actually happening in the newsgroup, rocksolid.nodes.help. They are devising encrypted messaging via NNTP
    that obfuscates sender from public disclosure but with less complexity
    than a mixnet.

    Have a look see at the last two weeks of messages in
    rocksolid.nodes.help. Two hackers are turning the Rocksolid Light engine
    into a quasi-social platform with some social features and encrypted
    messaging built-in, on a NNTP backend. I'm sure they would appreciate
    some more PHP coders and crypto-chango artists helping it along.

    Think of the end goal as 'fediverse' without the 'fed' and without the
    PC censorship so prevalent on the fediverse.

    SugarBug | https://sybershock.com

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  • From Doc O'Leary ,@21:1/5 to John on Sat Aug 5 17:36:38 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    For your reference, records indicate that
    John <john@building-m.simplistic-anti-spam-measure.net> wrote:

    I think it's a damn fool idea to flood the same 200MB video to 1,000 different Usenet servers on the off chance that somebody might be
    reading alt.cars.ford.edsel and wants to watch it.

    I agree. As I have said in other posts, it points to the fact that store-and-forward is no longer a practical way to build a distributed
    network. It may have made sense in the early days of Usenet when
    reliable connectivity wasn’t a given. We’re at least a decade past when that was the norm.

    Makes a lot more
    sense to post a link, be it to Youtube or some other hosting option (self-hosted if you're bold). If one wishes to be a grumpy protocol contrarian there's no reason it has to be an HTTP link either, by all
    means go wild and use FTP or gopher or 9p or *something* that makes more sense for distributing large files than the Net News Transport
    Protocol.

    I still don’t understand why people act like NNTP cannot be updated to something that actually supports “links” internally. I mean, really, all we’re talking about here is the idea that a server can refer to a message
    ID that it may not be able to provide. If it simply tracked a “source” server, it could either then later store-and-forward on request, or
    instruct the client to directly fetch it from that server itself.

    I’m all ears for better solutions than that, too. What I’m tired of hearing is “Oh, Usenet didn’t do that in 1998, so it can’t be done.”

    Your vaunted web forums usually don't host their own images or videos
    either, or if they do host images they are much restricted (1 image per
    post, max 200KB, only viewable by signed-in members etc.)

    Well, “vaunted” is not how I think anyone describes web forums, but the fact remains that the *user experience* is what allowed them to eat
    Usenet’s lunch. People don’t really care about the nuts and bolts of
    the technology. They just want to be able to write a message with some
    binary content. They can do it in emails, and that’s why people are
    still using email daily. I don’t think them expecting similar from
    Usenet, by whatever means it gets accomplished, is too big an ask.

    --
    "Also . . . I can kill you with my brain."
    River Tam, Trash, Firefly

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  • From John Levine@21:1/5 to All on Sat Aug 5 19:11:59 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    According to Doc O'Leary , <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com>:
    For your reference, records indicate that
    John <john@building-m.simplistic-anti-spam-measure.net> wrote:

    I think it's a damn fool idea to flood the same 200MB video to 1,000
    different Usenet servers on the off chance that somebody might be
    reading alt.cars.ford.edsel and wants to watch it.

    I agree. As I have said in other posts, it points to the fact that >store-and-forward is no longer a practical way to build a distributed >network. It may have made sense in the early days of Usenet when
    reliable connectivity wasn’t a given. We’re at least a decade past when >that was the norm.

    The people who run CDNs would likely disagree with you. Sometimes it
    makes sense to store copies of the content near the users, sometimes
    more sense to have everyone fetch it from one place.

    E-mail has the same problem, when someone sends a message with a large attachment to a distribution list. It would make a lot more sense to
    send a link that can be fetched as needed. Back in 1996 RFC 2017 defined
    the MIME message/external-body type intended to do that, but it never
    caught one. People I know in the IETF are thinking about updating it, with more modern URLs, and also a hash so you can be sure the file you fetch is
    the one you expect, and a decoding key so the file can be stored encrypted.

    If they do that, which seems likely, it wouldn't be hard to retrofit to
    usenet since we use the same MIME types that mail does.


    --
    Regards,
    John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
    Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

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  • From Jesse Rehmer@21:1/5 to droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com on Sat Aug 5 20:00:52 2023
    XPost: news.software.nntp

    On Aug 5, 2023 at 12:36:38 PM CDT, "Doc O'Leary ," <droleary@2017usenet1.subsume.com> wrote:

    I still don’t understand why people act like NNTP cannot be updated to something that actually supports “links” internally. I mean, really, all we’re talking about here is the idea that a server can refer to a message ID that it may not be able to provide. If it simply tracked a “source” server, it could either then later store-and-forward on request, or
    instruct the client to directly fetch it from that server itself.

    I’m all ears for better solutions than that, too. What I’m tired of hearing is “Oh, Usenet didn’t do that in 1998, so it can’t be done.”

    This is essentially what the commercial providers do with resellers. Some resellers have their own frontends, but they simply point to the source provider's backends. What type of agreements and how they "bill" for this kind of access I have no idea. If you take a look at Diablo's dreaderd code/configs it makes it easy to setup frontends that fetch articles by Message-ID from distributed backends.

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